On Tuesday 12 November 2024, I sat down with some coursemates to watch the Booker Prize ceremony. We chatted away, wine glasses in hand, about our different predictions of who would win, and, in the style of true English students, talked right through the prize announcement. After a quick rewind we discovered, to general shock, that all our guesses were wrong. The winner was Orbital. Just another sci-fi novel about space and astronauts and other things I am not particularly interested in. So I thought…
In reality, Orbital is about so much more than I first assumed, although it does cover those subjects. It’s set on the International Space Station, and follows six astronauts through the sixteen sunrises and sixteen sunsets of a single day. However, it definitely isn’t just a sci-fi novel, and it isn’t even speculative fiction – for the first time ever, life in space doesn’t have to be imaginary, and Samantha Harvey’s writing is impressively anchored in truth and experience (of ISS astronauts – not her own!). It’s new because it has to be new – never before has it been possible to write such a realistic and relatable story about living in space.
The novel has a faint but guiding narrative, with the astronauts’ highly structured day serving as a backbone for Harvey’s wider exploration of the world from this wonderful view. She intertwines mundane daily life aboard the Space Station, ponderings over Velázquez and the futility of life, personal snippets of grief and marriage problems, and political issues that pervade even this far corner of humanity: “because of ongoing political disputes please use your own national toilet.” And she does so with beautifully lyrical precision, capturing so much in such detail, that the novel itself seems to be a kind of satellite image – a snapshot of something simultaneously magnificent and minute.
At 136 pages, Orbital is the shortest of this year’s Booker shortlist, and, when thinking about the judges’ workload (to read over a hundred books in about seven months), it’s hard not to wonder how much its length played a part in forming their positive responses. But no matter how hard I try to be cynical, after reading Orbital it’s undeniable that its length is crucial to its success, and not just because it gave the judges a nice break from the heftier books! By making it difficult to read the book in more than one sitting, Harvey forces you to experience the whole day alongside the astronauts, floating between quarters, ascending and descending with each new chapter.
Shortness definitely doesn’t limit Harvey, as she offers us a cosmic appreciation of the “fleeting bloom of life and knowing.” We are told that, in thirty-five thousand orbits, this exploration will be over and the spaceship will crash down to earth, landing deep in the Pacific Ocean. Such an image, along with the novel’s shortness, means that you read in constant expectation of the end – an expectation which confronts us with our own transience. From space, a typhoon is visible only as “fine arrangements of cloud,” but on Earth we see “fifty children huddled behind a barricade of desks while the school around them blows away.” In her distinctive swinging between the macro and micro, Harvey does not urge us to recycle, switch off the lights, or even try to stop the climate crisis. She simply gives us a strange new perspective. Somehow, each human life seems to be just as huge and important as space.
Harvey’s fast pace of writing, flitting between different people and thoughts and planets and views, echoes the craziness of today’s world. But the novel somehow also forces you to slow down, reflect, and take ‘one small step’ back, in what can only be described as a ‘giant leap’ for the literary world.